The Surprising Backstory of the Tatnall Gazebo

The Tatnall Gazebo

Recently I had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful grounds of the Tatnall School, located on Barley 
Mill Road. There are a number of potential blog post topics related to the school, whether it's the founding of the school and its operation along Delaware Avenue in Wilmington beginning in the 1930, the move out of the city in 1952, or the 1860's house purchased by the school, which is still in use today. All good subjects for sure, but the story I want to tell now is that of a smaller structure on campus. It stands between that gorgeous old house and much newer tennis courts and playgrounds. It looks like a throw-back to a very much older time, and while it isn't quite that old, it does predate Tatnall's Christiana Hundred campus.

The structure in question is what appears to be a concrete gazebo, crafted in the style of a Greek temple. And while it could be just a random piece of decorative architecture on the grounds, its history and significance are quite a bit greater. Of all the things you might guess this cute little building was, I'd feel confident in saying "gas station" would be pretty far down the list. And yet, sure enough, that's what it was. The Tatnall gazebo was built as a gas station in Wilmington, and stood at 11th and Washington Streets for over 40 years. (It was boarded up for a number of years prior to being moved, and it's unclear exactly when it stopped doing business.)

Since most of you are thinking, "I've never seen a gas station like that," a little background and context might help it make more sense. Back in the earliest days of the automobile, car owners had to buy gasoline by the bucketful, take it home, and fill it into their tanks themselves using a measuring can. That all changed in 1905, with the introduction of S.F. Bowser's Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump. The big innovation here was the hose that drivers could use to pump gasoline directly into their car's tank. These contraptions, nicknamed "filling stations", were installed along the sides of public streets outside of general stores and the like. The pumps out front of John H. Foard's Store in Marshallton were typical of what you'd see in rural areas. However, in the cities, these street-side pumps tended to block traffic as motorists pulled in to fill up.

A "monumental" Atlantic station at Broad Street and
Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia

Gas companies, of which there were many in the post-Standard Oil break-up era after 1911, soon realized that if they built their own off-street facilities with multiple pumps, they could sell their product more safely and efficiently. Since consumers really had no way to differentiate between different gasoline products, one way the companies tried to stand out was with the design of their gas stations. Also bear in mind that most of them were being built on street corners in residential areas, so a pleasantly-designed station would help endear them to the local residents. 

Two of the leaders in this movement in our region were Gulf Oil and Atlantic Petroleum. Gulf used a variety of styles, including stations that looked like English cottages some in a Spanish style. There are actually still a half dozen or more of these relics still standing around Philadelphia -- some abandoned, some used for things like water (sorry, wooder) ice stands, and one Spanish style station that just a few months ago was saved from a construction site near Logan Circle and moved to a new home in Fairmount Park.

The Atlantic station at 40th and Walnut Streets in
Philadelphia. The central office is of a very similar
design to the one now at Tatnall

Atlantic, on the other hand, tended to design their stations in a more Classical style. Of these stations, built from the late 1910's through much of the 1920's, the epitome might have been the one at 40th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia, near the University of Pennsylvania campus. In the photo above, you can see the pumps behind the circular station that looks very much like the Tatnall gazebo. There were a number of different Classical style stations in Philadelphia and Wilmington, many designed by noted Pittsburgh architect Joseph F. Kuntz, whose most famous creation is the building that now houses the Andy Warhol Museum in the Steel City.

There were at one time as many as 50 such Atlantic stations scattered around, including 16 in Philadelphia. Atlantic operated five stations in Wilmington, although I don't know if they were all so-called "monumental" stations like the one at 11th and Washington. This one was, and I'm sure you were all wondering, based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, which was notable for being the first example of the Corinthian order of architecture (remember: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian).

An example of the ice box design service stations that began
replacing the "monumental" ones in the 1930's

The building of these very stylized and fancy-looking stations came to an end about the same time the Roaring '20s did. During the Great Depression in the 1930's, the oil companies started offering more services to their customers, and the so-called ice-box style stations, complete with service bays, began to be the common configuration. The older, smaller stations were eventually abandoned and either repurposed or removed. Our station, as mentioned earlier, had been boarded up for at least a few years by 1964, when the land it sat on was purchased and slated for development. 

August 1964 article about the move to Tatnall

At that point the development company gave the station to the first of the two heroes of our story, W.W. "Chick" Laird. Laird, a du Pont family descendant and heir, gave the station to the Tatnall School and paid to have it moved to their Barley Mill Road location. He was a long-time friend of Tatnall's founder, Frances Dorr Swift Tatnall. And if you're thinking, "Chick Laird saves old things in Wilmington and moves them out" sounds familiar -- it is! A few years back we learned that it was also Laird who stepped in to save a number of the Wilmington Fountain Society's stone troughs, which were being discarded. That was, I think just a few years after the rescuing of the Atlantic station, and while there were a bunch of the stone troughs, it's very possible that Tatnall's gazebo is the only remaining Kuntz Atlantic Petroleum gas station.

The station/gazebo on its way down Union Street in August 1964

As you can tell from the photos, there were a few modifications made to the station, which was constructed of white terra cotta tiles. The windows and door were removed (remember, it was originally an enclosed office), the electric lights as well, and the Atlantic Refining Company name taken off. It never had any official purpose on the Tatnall campus, but it soon became a favorite place for students to hang out. Sometimes teachers would even bring their classes out to the gazebo. However, the structure (like all of us) continued to age, and by the early 1980's its future was again uncertain.

The September 1983 News Journal article
that saved the gazebo (that, and the Henry
E.I. du Pont family)

Parts of the gazebo were chipping, rusting, and rotting, to the point were it was determined to be a dangerous eyesore. The City of Wilmington briefly toyed with the idea of acquiring the structure, but ultimately balked after realizing the costs involved. And then came a great example of the importance of local journalism. On September 6, 1983, The News Journal ran a short story about the imminent razing of the beloved gazebo. It noted the disappointment of the students, as well as the estimated cost of $10,000 to restore the structure. As a direct result of seeing that story in the paper, our second set of heroes -- the family of Mr. and Mrs. Henry E.I. and Martha du Pont -- stepped in to help. The du Ponts and their four children, three of whom had attended the Tatnall School, donated the $10,000 needed to restore the gazebo in memory of of their nephew/cousin who had recently attended and passed away at a young age.

The gazebo remains a favorite spot on campus today

The Tatnall gazebo was made beautiful again and remains so to this day, standing proudly as a beloved part of the bucolic campus. As students young and old hang out in their favorite spot, I wonder how many know that they're in an office built for motorists to pay for the gas for their Model T's, Packards, Hudsons, and Duesenbergs. The gazebo stands as one of, if not the last, tangible link to a brief but fascinating era of automotive history.